Internet

North Korea’s Internet connection is experiencing problems again, leading to difficulties in connecting to North Korean websites from outside of the country, according to data from Dyn Research. Users inside North Korea are also presumably having trouble reaching sites in the rest of the world.

The problems began just after 3am UTC and continued for several hours, as can be seen in this graph below.

North Korea’s Internet space is divided into four networks and the graph shows instability and accessibility of those four networks from locations outside of the country. The white space in the bottom graph shows a complete inability More >

A bizarre attempt to raise $10 million to fund a coup in North Korea appears to have ended shortly after it began.

A fund-raising campaign asking for money to “Help Bring Freedom to North Korea” was posted on Indiegogo on January 18, but several days later was deleted from the site.

An Indiegogo campaign, before it was deleted, asks for $10 million to end Kim Jong Un’s regime

“We are Freedom Now, a covert multi-national group with the sole mission of bringing freedom and democracy to the people of North Korea,” read the introduction to the campaign when it was launched. Later, the description was edited More >

Greater access to information, particularly the Internet, will likely prove to be what ends the rule of North Korea’s regime, President Obama said last week in an interview.

Speaking to YouTube creators during an event at The White House, Obama said military options against the country were limited, in part because of the potential damage that South Korea could suffer in a conflict.

“Our capacity to affect change in North Korea is somewhat limited because you got a million person army and they have nuclear technologies and missiles,” said Obama. “That’s all they spend their money on essentially, is on their war machine, and we’ve got an ally of South More >

Hackers have hit a Facebook page for North Korean airline Air Koryo replacing it with messages in support of Islamic State militants and against North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The page shot to fame earlier in the year when it began replying to user comments and questions about trips to North Korea. It claimed to be the airline’s official page, but appeared to be run by an Air Koryo agent in Russia.

The hack came a day after a similar attack on the Facebook and Twitter pages of U.S. Central Command. Hackers typically gain access to Facebook accounts by tricking users into giving away More >

Will Scott, the American that spent a semester teaching computer science at the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, spoke about his experiences this week at the Chaos Computer Club’s annual conference in Hamburg.

Scott, who has just returned from the second trip to PUST, went into detail on the IT environment at the university, availability of the Internet, access to computers and cell phones, and his observations on Red Star Desktop 3.0, the latest version of North Korea’s home-grown Linux operating system.

Will Scott speaks at the Chaos Computer Club conference in Hamburg on December 29, 2014.

North Korea’s Internet connection with the world suffered outages on December 27 and December 28.

The latest instability on the connection began around 0400 UTC (1 p.m. local time in Pyongyang) on Sunday and continued for a couple of hours, according to monitoring by Dyn Research. The U.S.-based organization recorded several instances in which connections to the four sub-networks that make up the North Korean Internet were completely unavailable.

An outage between North Korea and the Internet on December 28, 2014 (Image: Dyn Research)

The outage followed a larger one on Saturday evening that appears to have begun at around 1040 UTC (7:40 p.m. More >

In a statement carried by the state-run Korean Central News Agency on Saturday, the country’s National Defence Commission laid blame for the Internet problem at the feet of the U.S., saying the country “started disturbing the internet operation of major media of the DPRK.”

North Korea’s Internet connection with the world has returned to service after a nine and a half hour outage that followed hours of patchy performance.

The cause of the outage is unknown, although several experts think it was probably due to an external distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack. This involves flooding web servers and other Internet hardware with so much traffic that they become overloaded and cannot respond to legitimate traffic. It’s not an actual hack of the system and so the situation is normalized soon after the DDOS flow of traffic stops.

If you’ve been trying to connect to North Korean Internet sites in the last 24 hours, you might have been unsuccessful.

Connectivity between North Korea and the rest of the world has been spotty for much of the time, according to Dyn Research.

Look at the graph below. Each period of purple corresponds to an outage on North Korea’s Internet connection.

Is this related to all that’s been going on in the last few days? Possibly. North Korea’s Internet connection does suffer from periodic outages, so it could be something as mundane as network maintenance or a failing router.

Kim Il Sung University, North Korea’s most prestigious seat of higher learning, has become the first university in the country to launch a website on the global Internet.

The site is available in Korean and English and is being served from a computer in Pyongyang. It joins a handful of other websites that are run by the North Korean government and accessible from outside of the country.